9:44 a.m. Feeling loads of bodily pleasure, very similar to what I can feel with anapanasati (samatha) meditation. Have felt this occasionally over the past few days.
Started what will probably be my last menstrual period yesterday. Scheduled to have my ovaries and fallopian tubes removed on Monday -- five days from now. Will then experience surgical menopause as my body abruptly withdraws from reproductive hormones. Remarkably, although I've been in perimenopause for about seven years (evidenced by my menstrual periods becoming more and more irregular), I've not read any books on menopause, and have only asked a few friends about it. Ordered some books from the library today.
Very interesting but hard to describe experience in recent weeks:
First, the background. Often throughout my adult life I've noticed my body being tense or hunched over, and feel desperate to straighten it out. Panicky. If I try to gently relax, rather than abruptly correct the hunch, I feel even more panicky, with thoughts such as, "this will not work."
Lately I've been noticing and encouraging the thoughts, and seeing that I can indeed relax out of the hunch. The thoughts appear to be irrelevant to my actual experience.
Today when running to/from stairs with Sue, I similarly verbalized my discomfort around running. I've been working on this for months/years so this is an incremental success, but--the thoughts were like this: "This is impossible" "I've tried this before, it doesn't work" "Don't even try" "You can't do this". Then, when I noticed that I could do it (I could relax and feel more physically at ease during running) -- "No! You mean, it's this simple? It's this easy? I've been suffering needlessly most of my life? No! No!" and "If I let go of this [anxiety], there is nothing. Void! I must hold onto it, I can't lose this!!!" And, "So I've been wrong my whole life? I can't let that be!" "This is recovery? This is what recovery looks like? It is nothing like I imagined. It is amazing and terrible."
Have been relaxing similarly around my work. Noticing thoughts, "I can't do this! I can't show how stupid I am! I must produce!" and letting them be, to the side, while I calmly (from the left side) proceed.
Really amazing.
